


You Only Live Twice

by twinfinite



Category: NCIS
Genre: Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Major Illness, Tony Dinozzo is a Mess, not an original concept but here's my version, return of the plague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 06:13:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15479400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twinfinite/pseuds/twinfinite
Summary: When Tony looks at the clock on his DVD player, he isn’t quite sure whether or not he’s surprised to find that it’s 11:00 PM already. He doesn’t really remember it getting dark, but the shadows are lengthening along the walls, and he’s not really doing okay anymore.





	You Only Live Twice

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this story written in my mind for years and I actually wrote it out maybe a year ago. I always referred to it as "The Old Broad" and I thought it would never go on the internet. But then I got bored and posted it on Tumblr and that got about three likes, so I figured why not post it here, too?

Tony wakes up at 10:00 AM on Sunday morning feeling decidedly worse than he had when he’d fallen asleep. Rather than completely destroying his resolve that he absolutely does not need to seek help, this realization somehow digs him deeper into his cocoon of denial. Surely this is just something that needs to get worse before it gets better. This line of reasoning is flimsy at best, but the thought of the emergency room is simply too distasteful, especially if it turns out he’s just overreacting. 

When Tony finally finds the energy to sit up, it triggers a coughing fit so powerful he almost considers not leaving the warm comfort of his bed at all, his need for food and water be damned. The only thing that actually gives him the power to stagger out of his bedroom is the promise of the one thing he can think of besides a strong dose of tranquilizers that can make him feel any better: a movie marathon. It’s for days like this that Tony made a point to own every single James Bond movie on DVD, and he intends to make good on it. Instead of thinking about how challenging the walk from the kitchen to his couch has become overnight, Tony tries to figure out how long it would take to watch every Bond film without stopping. 

A long time, he decides. Maybe he’ll feel better by the time he gets through Sean Connery. That would mean he could make it into work on Monday without Gibbs taking a single look at him and sternly sending him home. Wouldn’t that be nice? He feels like he can’t remember what it felt like to breathe normally. Maybe his lungs just want to leave his body. Are lungs supposed to be this heavy?

Tony thinks he might have gotten through half of Sean Connery, but honestly the entire afternoon feels like one big fever dream punctuated only by a few brief trips to the kitchen to refill his glass of water. He thinks maybe at one point he ate a handful of crackers, but that may have been part of the dream he had in which he and McGee were trying to host a house party. Did Daniel Craig show up at one point? He didn’t remember putting on Casino Royale. 

When Tony looks at the clock on his DVD player, he isn’t quite sure whether or not he’s surprised to find that it’s 11:00 PM already. He doesn’t really remember it getting dark, but the shadows are lengthening along the walls, and he’s not really doing okay anymore. 

When he lets out a coughing fit to end all coughing fits, he’s also not quite sure if he’s surprised to see tiny pinpricks of blood on the sleeve of his gray sweatshirt. He’s alarmed, definitely. But though he’s purposefully kept his head up his ass for this long, he’s not stupid. He remembers all too well the warnings he’d received from multiple medical professionals about living with scarred lungs. 

At this point, Tony knows he has to do something, but his brain is a deadly combination of sluggish and panicked. 

His first thought is to grab his coat and drive himself to the nearest hospital, but when he looks down at his shaking hands he quickly tosses the idea out. The goal is to live through this, not end up in a massive pileup less than a mile from his apartment.

His second thought is to just call 911 and be done with it. It’s a practical option, he knows, but something just doesn’t sit right. Maybe it’s just the last remnants of denial trying to convince him that this really isn’t so bad after all, and that an ambulance would be overkill. More likely, however, is that it’s just a case of Dinozzo pride. The image of being carted off in a stretcher in front of all his neighbors is somewhat mortifying, and the thought of the ambulance fees on top of it all make his answer to this option a firm no thank you. 

He needs help though. This he’s past the point of denying. 

Gibbs then? No, he lives the furthest away of all his colleagues, and this is a bit time-sensitive. Now that he’s no longer in the practice of ignoring his body’s cry for help, he realizes he’s truly not getting enough oxygen right now, and he’s declining fast. 

Ducky? While he would be the most qualified to help, he lives nearly as far away as Gibbs. 

McGee lives the closest, maybe he could ask him. But no, he really doesn’t want to freak the poor Probie out with the sight of him. He knows McGee saw him back in isolation, back when things were bad. McGee probably thinks he doesn’t remember the look on this face when he came to visit for the first time, but Tony can’t forget it. And he’d rather not see it again.

In the end, the choice is pretty simple. 

It takes Tony longer than he’d like to admit to get back to his bedroom; his legs barely want to hold up his weight and he takes multiple breaks just to catch his breath in between coughs. When he finally reaches his cell phone and successfully dials, relief washes over him as if it was a hard earned battle.

Ziva picks up on the second ring.

“Hello?” 

“Hey,” Tony breathes weakly. His voice sounds pathetically hoarse despite his best efforts to sound relatively functional. The single word is the first he’s spoken all day, and of course it triggers another round of coughing. He covers the phone hastily so Ziva doesn’t have to hear it, but he knows her well enough to be certain that this effort won’t fool her. 

“Tony.” Ziva says, her tone commanding and inquisitive. It also betrays a thread of concern, but it’s well hidden. “What is going on?”

“I, uh-” Tony starts. He tries to take wheeze out a breath with only marginal success. “I think I might...need a ride...to the hospital.” 

“I will be there in ten minutes,” Ziva responds, and promptly hangs up.

Any GPS will tell you that it takes exactly seventeen minutes to get from Ziva’s house to Tony’s apartment. Ziva is there in nine.

 

* * *

 

It took Ziva over a year of working with Tony for her to find out that he’d almost died from a medieval disease less than a month before she met him for the first time. In hindsight, it’s not so odd; it’s not exactly a topic anyone wants to talk about. In fact, the first few times the incident was ever mentioned in her presence was by Tony himself, and she thought he was kidding. In a way, he always was joking, but she was never in on the joke. 

“Hey, Ziva, Ducky’s giving out free flu shots if you want one. Flu’s not as bad as the plague or anything but it’s still worth sparing ten minutes I guess...”

“Ziva, if I survive your driving, it’ll be a bigger miracle than surviving the plague…”

In hindsight, none of her coworkers really seemed to enjoy it when Tony poked fun about his own health, but when did they ever enjoy his juvenile quips? It wasn’t Ziva’s fault that she spent so long out of the loop. They should have mentioned something as important as this early on and spared her the awkward conversation that did end up occuring. 

Tony, McGee, and Ziva had been sitting at their desks a few days after another ill-fated undercover case during which Tony had been whacked senseless by another marine-killing nutjob of the week. The bruises hadn’t even quite faded, and yet the two men were already poking fun at the situation. 

“You’re probably the most danger-prone person I’ve ever met, Tony,” McGee commented good-naturedly. “You’ve got to have the highest injury record of anyone in NCIS.”  

“Hey, come on! Now that’s just not true.” Tony had replied, though it was hard to believe him given the sizeable black eye he was sporting.  

“Name one other person who spends more time getting patched up by Ducky than you, then,” McGee had fired back. 

Tony paused, making a show of thinking through the challenge. “Okay, so I know I’m getting a bit of a reputation for twisted ankles and mild concussions, but have you considered how Gibbs was literally blown into a coma? I think coma beats bumps and bruises any day.” His eyes had flashed over towards Ziva, and he’d given her his most charming and mischievous grin, obviously trying to rope her into their little game. “Ziva, you can be the judge. Who wins NCIS’s most danger-prone? Me or Gibbs?” 

Ziva rolled her eyes, but couldn’t quite stifle the smile. 

“It is very hard to take your question seriously with that black eye,” she had replied, not wanting to make this easy for him. Tony’s grin faded, and it was quickly replaced with his best kicked-puppy look. 

“You can’t deny that this is nothing compared to an amnesia-inducing coma!” Tony protested, gesturing wildly at his face. “Don’t just let Probie have this one!” 

Ziva looked over towards McGee, who was honestly beginning to look just a little too smug. 

“You did not let me finish. You certainly do get punched in the face more than anyone I know, but it is hard to beat a near death experience.” 

“Ha! The judge has spoken!” Tony laughed.

McGee didn’t look as deflated as Ziva had expected at this loss. Instead, he had adopted his own version of Tony’s mischievous grin.

“Are you forgetting that you’re the only person here who managed to get a disease from the Middle Ages? You literally had a brush with the black death, which would officially put you ahead of Gibbs!” 

“Too far, Probie, too far!” Tony had replied, but he didn’t truly seem offended by the memory. 

Ziva, not understanding, had simply laughed. This was not the first time she’d heard mentions of the plague, but it was certainly the most ridiculous. It took her a moment to realize that McGee and Tony looked completely sincere

“You cannot be serious.” Ziva said. 

“Oh, I wish he wasn’t. But yeah, I got a touch of the plague a while ago. Biological warfare thing. You’re lucky you missed it. It was a whole thing.” 

Ziva’s eye narrowed, and she scrutinized her coworkers closely, trying to make sure they weren’t trying to prank her. Tony, though he was admittedly a very good agent, was not very hard to read sometimes, at least to her. He wouldn’t quite meet her eyes, and he quickly changed the subject. McGee didn’t try to bring up that he’d won that particular argument again, and Ziva didn’t ask any questions. She simply made a mental note to look up that case later.

* * *

 

When Ziva receives the phone call from Tony at 11:21 PM that evening, she has already long since done her research on Tony’s situation. She knows all about the low survival rate he was given, and how his lungs are scarred from the experience. She realizes that he went through this only three weeks before they first met, which had surprised her. She had always assumed that he’d looked so rough that day from the grief. She knows that Kate had been there with him through the worst of it, and that awful memory was most likely linked to her memory in a way that would make it all the more painful to remember. So, she never asked him about it. 

As she hears Tony’s breathless request for help, Ziva can’t help but wish she’d asked. She doesn’t quite know what to do with this weakened version of her coworker. However, she wasn’t trained as a special agent for nothing, so she does what she knows best: she jumps into action. 

Traffic laws mean nothing to Ziva on a good day, and she’s fairly certain that if a police car tries to pull her over, she’ll simply flash her badge and tell them to stuff it. The ride to Tony’s apartment is short, but it gives her enough time to analyze her last few interactions with Dinozzo at work the previous Friday. She’s having a difficult time connecting how normal he’d seemed then to how quickly he’d come to a point where he was willing to swallow his pride and ask for her help. He’d been acting somewhat slow and subdued by the end of the workday, and Gibbs had pointedly commanded him not to come into work until Monday morning, but at the time Ziva had brushed that off as her boss being overprotective. 

Obviously, Gibbs had known something she had not, but this isn’t the time to feel guilty for not being more attentive. If Dinozzo doesn’t want you to know what’s going on in his life, he makes it nearly impossible to find out, she knows.

Ziva illegally parks her car in front of Tony’s building and glances down at her watch. It’s 11:33. She doesn’t know whether or not this situation warrants her running, so she settles for a hasty jog up the stairs. She knocks on his door and waits far too long for an answer. 

When the door swings open, Ziva works hard to keep her face neutral, but what she sees is worse than she was expecting. The mere act of walking from his couch to the door has left Tony swaying and sweating, and he leans against the doorframe as though it were a crutch. She so rarely sees him out of his nice work suits, and he looks childish in his ratty sweatpants and college hoodie. She spots the blood on his sleeve and feels her blood run cold. His lips are already adopting a blueish tinge, and she knows they have to hurry. 

“Hey, Ziva,” Tony says, waving sheepishly. His voice is barely there, and it’s clearly painful to speak, but somehow there’s a smile on his face at the sight of her. She feels instinctively protective, but she’s also not one to coddle. 

“You should have called sooner,” she says curtly. 

He opens his mouth to reply.

“Do not speak. Are you ready to go?”

Tony seems confused by the question, which is enough indication that he’s getting worse rapidly. He’s much less alert than he was on the phone. He barely seems to be holding himself upright, and he’s not wearing shoes. Despite this, he nods yes and starts to take a step forward. Before he has a chance to stumble on unsteady legs, Ziva grabs Tony’s arm and rests as much of his body weight on herself he’ll let her. She feels the heat of a rising fever against her skin. 

“Sorry,” Tony murmurs. 

Ziva is not quite sure what he’s apologizing for, so she says nothing, just leads him slowly towards her waiting car. The process of getting there is slow and painful, and they have to pause as he strains his way through ugly bursts of coughing. When he’s at last safely deposited in her passenger seat, they are both out of breath. 

“Bethesda?” she asks, already pulling out of the parking lot. Tony just nods. 

“It will be alright,” Ziva says, not knowing if it’s true or not. 

Once they arrive in the emergency room, it doesn’t take long for Tony to be whisked away; the words “pneumonic plague” have the magical effect of granting immediate attention. She’s not allowed back with him, and it’s nearly midnight. By all means, she’s done her duty. The best thing she can do now is call Gibbs and tell him that Tony won’t be making it in tomorrow morning and then go home and get some rest before going into work the next morning. 

Instead, she sits down on the cold plastic chair in the waiting room, and she waits. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment, I don't know if anyone still in actively in this fandom or if anyone would appreciate that this fic exists, but if even a couple people are interested I'm down to write more.


End file.
